Human language and our reptilian brain. The subcortical bases of speech, syntax, and thought.

Abstract

For the past 200 years, virtually all attempts to account for the neural bases and the evolution of human language have focused on the neocortex. And in the past 40 years, linguists adhering to Noam Chomsky's theories have essentially equated language with syntax, hypothetically specified by an innate, genetically transmitted "universal grammar." In Human Language and our Reptilian Brain (2000), I attempt to shift the focus. My premise is that speech is the central element of human linguistic ability and both speech and syntax are learned skills, based on a neural "functional language system" (FLS). Although neither the anatomy nor the physiology of the FLS can be specified with certainty at the present time, converging behavioral and neurobiological data point to language being regulated by a distributed network that crucially involves subcortical structures, the basal ganglia, often associated with reptilian brains though they derive from amphibians.